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Here Are 5 Things Marketers Can Learn From The Iowa Caucus Debacle

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Dems in disarray! Iowa was a disaster! Mayor Pete blew his chance to control the narrative! Iowa is a metaphor for the Democratic party! 

This week’s Iowa Caucuses led to a volcano of doomsday predictions by the chattering classes. The response was predictable. To be fair, the conclusion to a year of campaigning in Iowa was unsatisfying. But was it the debacle that the pundits proclaim?

Failures happen all the time. NASA has had a number of them, but the program is still going, now with talk of going to Mars and forming a Space Force. Elon Musk has had numerous rockets explode, but have you seen the stock price of his other company lately? The Oscars survived a debacle ending in 2017 but they’re the talk of social media this week. Even the Cubs were able to overcome the curse of Steve Bartman.

Failure happens all the time. The most important thing is to learn from it.

The most important task is to learn from failure. The simplest thing is to avoid it altogether, which is why talk of doing away with the Iowa Caucuses has reached a crescendo this week. But there are some simple steps that marketers can take to help increase the chance of getting through a significant live event alive. Sh*t happens. The key is how you deal with it. 

Here are 5 things that marketers can learn from the Iowa Caucus experience:

Don’t worship the new. The biggest culprit in Iowa this week appeared to be an app developed by a company named, believe it or not, Shadow, designed to quickly report results to headquarters in a streamlined and efficient manner. It failed. Bigly. There appeared to have been a coding issue, which was fixed, but even more problematic, staffers on the ground simply hadn’t been trained to use it. In an all-volunteer enterprise—many older volunteers—expecting people to download an app and get up and running immediately was an unnecessary complication. 

Changing anything requires massive effort and incurs massive risk.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it….In addition to collecting info via a new app, Iowa Democrats decided to report more data than before. Previously, only the final delegate counts had been made public. Now, in the interest of transparency, the individual voter preferences would be reported, as well. Guess what? Ultimately nothing was reported on the night of the Caucuses, so their impact on the news cycle was nullified. Changing anything requires massive effort and incurs massive risk. Changing something as important as the first vote in the nation just wasn’t worth it in retrospect.

Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. The first rule of any live event is: expect failure. Failure will happen early and often. If you haven’t experienced failure in live events, then you’re not experienced enough to produce major live events. Once you know this, you’ll see signs of expected failure everywhere. Take a look at the microphones on panelists for live shows like Real Time with Bill Maher. If you look closely, you won’t see one microphone, but two, in case one fails. Sure, you could have a guy run out with another one, but that would seem unprofessional. Experience has taught Real Time producers to expect failure.

Perhaps the biggest live risk of all is the tech demo. My company has produced many of these. All are fraught with risk. All are filled with redundancies. Once you start noticing them, you’ll see them everywhere. Why are there 2 Macs side by side in an Apple demo? Why are there 2 cameras on FaceTime demo? Why is the table draped in black? Because underneath, there’s a small city of backup computers and software.

Set expectations. Some of the most notable failures of all time live on forever on YouTube. How can tech companies suffer so many public failures and yet still be so successful? They set expectations. The audience and press are conditioned to treat new technology differently than a pedestrian event like an election outcome. New devices are supposed to be amazing. Election results are not. Don’t try to make your tried-and-true, boring product different than it is. Sometimes we want tried-and-true and boring.

Have a sense of humor. When all else fails, laugh about it. With a raft of bad press piling onto Apple’s iPhone 4 “Attenagate” controversy, Steve Jobs called a press conference to take on the criticism. You’ll probably never see an angrier Jobs than during this press conference. He was justifiably proud of the new iPhone design, and the product was selling like crazy, as usual. But the controversy couldn’t be denied. Jobs did a smart thing. He started his press conference with a popular viral video that told critics “If you don’t want the iPhone 4, don’t buy it. If you do, and you don’t like it, take it back.” Jobs tried to put the controversy in perspective by poking fun at the elephant in the room. The press conference worked, and the iPhone lived to see another day (and make Apple the first trillion-dollar company).

You can’t control everything. But the Iowa Caucus result provides a great example of many things not to do, and some remedies for future events. Life goes on. But smart marketers learn from their mistakes and the mistakes of others.

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